Counting Down to the Second-Half Preview

First, the answer to the question you want answered: When will you publish your second-half preview? The answer: tomorrow! By this time tomorrow, you will be diving into our unparalleled preview encompassing dozens of the most hotly anticipated titles coming in the next six months.

The preview is a big effort with many people spending many hours to make it happen. And that’s also true of The Millions as a whole.

The Millions has been around for more than 14 years and has never made a living for anyone, but it has thrived. For a while there, it seemed to thrive almost against all odds. Even as economic realities closed in on other online magazines, The Millions had stayed a couple of steps ahead.

Last fall, however, we saw that these realities might soon catch up with us, as we became concerned that The Millions was becoming increasingly reliant on fewer and fewer revenue streams. Like everyone else, we saw that we were at the mercy of the usual suspects: Amazon, Google, Facebook. One small change from any of these giants could send The Millions hurtling to oblivion.

So we decided that we had to try something new: to protect our future, we invited our readers to supports us. Many did, and we are deeply grateful, but we know that many more have not.

Since we wrote in November 2016, the revenue situation has become that much trickier, as changes to the programs we rely on have further eroded the revenue picture and we have scrambled to make up the shortfall. The more we can get our readers to contribute, the more stable our footing will be.

It’s a very quick and simple process and we have a number of tiers that should be manageable for any budget. The three main tiers are annual recurring donations. There is also a monthly option.

And please note that we have a Sponsor tier on our Support page that allows for contributions at a higher level. This tier is for corporations and institutions as well as for individuals in the books and publishing ecosystem who are thriving. We rely on their support especially.

2 comments:

I thought Amazon was your backer? I buy a lot of books based on your twice yearly lists. PW has just put there Fall listings, and Kirkus is always up to date with upcoming books. But there is something about The Millions lists that thrill me. I would not have discovered Abbi Geni (to name just one author) whose book I bought from my local indie.. So I am a bit stuck here. Can Amazon, which works great for people who live far from any book store, not cough up some funds?

Thanks to an onslaught of comment spam, which until now I've been dealing with manually, I've decided to turn on Blogger's "word verification" to put a stop to it. It's annoying because it adds an extra step to commenting here, but it's the best solution right now. If a better way of dealing with the spam problem comes along, I'll switch it off. For now though, it's been added to the Commenting at The Millions primer (if anyone needs a refresher.)

Over the years, Millions contributors and guests have penned many book reviews for the site. However, this wealth of content has long been buried in the archives.And so, in the spirit of starting off the new year on the right foot, we've created The Millions Book Review Index, which lists every review, squib, appreciation, and consideration we've ever run here alphabetically by author. As we add new reviews to the site, they will appear in the index as well, so we encourage you to bookmark the page for easy access. We hope you find the index useful. Stay tuned for another great year at The Millions.